A Structuring Chaos Blog

Motion masquerades as progress

the NYT Blog has a piece today that shines a big spotlight on the issue with the Democratic party/White House vs. the voters

The voters appear to have been looking into what “representative government” means and does

Ezra Klein on the other hand – quoted in this NYT blog – views that government is there to “do stuff” – politics is about “getting things done” and by that measure, the Democrats were successful.

“if you see the point of politics as actually getting things done,” rather than just trying to preserve a majority for as many years as possible, “the last two years, for Democrats, have been a stunning, historic success. Whatever else you can say about the 111th Congress, it got things done … if [its members] failed as politicians, they succeeded as legislators. And legislating is, at least in theory, what they came to Washington to do.”

Representing the voters who elected the legislators doesn’t appear to be the point here. In Kleins’ logic, doing anything counts as success as opposed to doing what the voters indicate they elected you to do. That’s not “preserving a majority for as many years as possible” – that’s called REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNING.

UPDATE: From Michelle Malkin – the voters in a couple states are taking the ‘amazing progress’ Klein refers to and telling them “you misunderstood – we said NO THANKS”

In 2008, the Democrats didn’t get a mandate to do whatever they thought best – voters be cursed. In 2010, the GOP didn’t get a mandate to do whatever THEY thought best – voters be cursed.

The interesting philosophic differences between conservatives and progressives are also captured at their barest essence in that statement.

The conservative philosophy asks “I wonder why someone put that fence up there – should we be prepared for a wild raging animal if we cut the fence down? Are we prepared enough to face whatever consequences occur?”

The progressive philosophy is “cut the fence down & we’ll fix it later, we have to do something. We might not do the right thing but we did SOMEthing“.

The sooner both parties remove the “M” word from their vocabulary the minute they win an election or two, the better represented the voters will be, and the less shocked the leaders of either party will be – come election days ahead. I thought the point was to govern….not to rule